Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel Book 1)

by Josiah Bancroft

  Tarrou looked at Senlin distantly as if he were a stranger who’d wandered into view. Senlin felt a flush of embarrassment. He had misinterpreted the man’s politeness for a sincere offer of friendship. Goll had warned him: a man had no friends in the Tower. He was a fool to hope otherwise.

  Senlin was about to dart back out into the street when Tarrou abruptly emerged from his trance. “Headmaster! No, don’t go! You only surprised me. I was walking down a road a thousand miles away.” He rubbed his face vigorously. “Muddit, this ghostly light makes the mind wander!”

  Tarrou coaxed and flattered Senlin into the chair across from him, smiling over the prongs of his black beard. A young woman in a red apron appeared with a second glass. Tarrou made a show of ordering their dinner, bantering flirtatiously with the server as he did. He ordered the snails and lamb, potatoes, and stewed dates beside, and then turned the empty bottle upside-down over his head and said, “My brains are going dry,” at which the server giggled. She quickly returned with a full, uncorked bottle.

  Soon, the siphoned sunlight dimmed and was replaced by a silvery cast of much paler moonlight. Senlin’s face felt warm with wine and his stomach was round with excellent food. Their plates were cleared, a bottle of port was brought, and they turned their chairs to face the dark water that flashed like cracked onyx. The painter closed up his easel. Gas lamps along the streets and pedestrian bridges were lit. Music from the dance halls mingled in the distance. A woman’s laughter reverberated from a hotel terrace behind them. Senlin wished again to have Marya with him, though if she were there, she would almost certainly pull him from his chair and chase him to the nearest dance hall.

  Though their conversation during dinner had been eclipsed by their appetite, the two men now began speaking with the ease of old friends.

  “And there are no peacocks?” Senlin asked.

  “There are two flamingos for every man and thousands of finches and parrots and swallows and doves, and I’ve heard of an eccentric who walks a dodo on a leash. But I’ve never seen a peacock.”

  Senlin laughed. “I met someone who was certain there were peacocks.”

  “I’m suspicious of people who are certain. I’ve known men who say that, without a shadow of a doubt, the Tower contains forty-six ringdoms. They’d start fistfights over this undeniable fact.” Tarrou sucked his teeth. “And I have also met seemingly sincere airmen who swore the Tower had only thirty-two ringdoms.” Tarrou tapped his nose, “I know the truth. The Tower is only as tall as the man that climbs it.”

  “To uncertainty!” Senlin offered by way of toast, and Tarrou raised his glass. “If there are no peacocks there must be lamb at least. That was one of the sweetest chops I’ve ever tasted.”

  “There’s no room in the Baths for lambs, unless you count the herds of courtesans flouncing around in those horrible wool wigs. You’ve seen them! Every one of them, I promise you, is hopping with lice.”

  Tarrou went on to explain that most perishable delicacies were carried up on airships, which was also the most popular passage for tourists. “It’s only the adventurous and the frugal who climb the Tower by foot.” Tarrou said, causing Senlin to feel self conscious about his livelihood. He imagined that to Tarrou, who he’d learned owned three mines, one of which produced emeralds, teaching children to read, write, and multiply must seem a rather lowly living. “Don’t scowl, Headmaster. So the lamb flies while you climb! You are no lamb. You have mettle and wits. Everyone else here is softer, dumber, and poorer than they pretend to be! They’re all pig farmers and grocers in royal drag.” Tarrou wrapped his napkin about his head like a turban. It made Senlin laugh.

  “I’m sorry that you’re leaving, Tarrou. It’s refreshing to have good company.”

  “Ah! It can’t be helped. To tell the truth, I’ve delayed my homecoming too long. My wife will have sold off all of my possessions.”

  “You’re married?” Senlin was surprised.

  “Twenty-eight... no, twenty-nine years. Though, between us, it feels not a day more than thirty. She is a patient woman, but I have made her wait too long.”

  Finding that Tarrou was married only endeared him to Senlin more, though he wondered why a man in the prime of his middle age would come to the Baths without his wife. Such a separation seemed to make a question of love and marriage. Why marry if you were going to walk the wonders of the world alone?

  Though, Senlin had to admit, that was exactly what he had done.

  Chapter Two

  “The only real danger is of growing so relaxed that one falls asleep while soaking in a bath. To prevent accidental drowning, go with a companion or seek out a new friend.”

  - Everyman’s Guide to the Tower of Babel, IV. IV

  Days passed.

  A regular schedule emerged, which was a comfort to Senlin. Mornings were spent discreetly searching hotel registries for signs of Marya. When Senlin felt panic creeping in, he reminded himself that Marya was resourceful, he was patient, and the Tower was finite. He read the Guide, his only book. He searched its many platitudes for practical advice and found little. He wished he had brought more books. When these consolations failed, he fortified himself with a glass of wine.

  Days passed.

  It wasn’t long before he found his way behind the cake-decorated hotels and galleries to the narrower alleys where the porters, maids and vendors lived. Those cloistered avenues were not slums exactly, but they were generally humble and often rundown. Shutters hung unevenly from glassless windows, and laundry lines sutured the alleyways. The air was muggy with human scents. The reflected sunlight was dimmer here, too, which allowed lichen to bloom on the plaster walls and cobblestones, turning them slick and spongy and gray-green.

  Among the tenement apartments were boarding houses which could be hired short term and on short notice. An effective search of the boarding houses was difficult because they were disorganized, overcrowded, and often run by suspicious, unhelpful proprietors. Senlin felt conspicuous and unwelcome in the back alleys of the Baths, and it wasn’t long before he found excuses to avoid searching them. After all, he doubted very much that Marya would have to resort to such drab and unsafe accommodations.

  Days passed, and the trauma of the Parlor dwindled in his memory. He had all but convinced himself that Edith had recovered and found her way home. The fall harvest wasn’t too far off. The Generaless, he liked to think, had overcome her allergy and reclaimed her command. She would always carry the scar, the Parlor’s brand, but she would enjoy a full and long life far from the shadow of the Tower.

  He took his lunch outside the Customs Gate, where it was relatively easy to pass unnoticed amidst the wash of tourists. Ever since his first exposure to the customs agents, he had been careful to avoid attracting their attention. It wasn’t easy; the navy-coated agents were everywhere. They marched under the orders of someone called the Commissioner, who was often discussed, yet seldom seen in public. Otherwise, the rule of law was a mystery to him. Truthfully, he hoped it would remain one. The Everyman’s Guide said nothing substantive about the laws of the Baths, but he wanted to believe the Baths was a more civil ringdom than the Basement or the Parlor. He wasn’t looking for evidence to the contrary.

  But the evidence, he’d soon discover, was inescapable.

  In the evenings, he dined with John Tarrou. Tarrou had failed to follow through on his promise to leave in the morning, and Senlin soon understood that it was a kind of daily homage he paid his wife: Tarrou was always preparing to depart for home.

  Senlin continued to keep his situation to himself, though it increasingly seemed ridiculous. And still, he could never quite bring himself to confess to Tarrou that he in fact had a wife and that he had lost her. Perhaps his discretion had turned to paranoia. Perhaps he treasured Tarrou’s ignorance. So long as he didn’t speak of Marya, they could laugh, bicker, philosophize, and drink. If not for these distractions, Senlin would have to face the dread that was ballooning inside of him. The dread was already as s
tubborn as a wine stain and as pervasive as a chill. Suppose Marya never came? Suppose she had found a way home without their train tickets? Suppose she was injured, or captured, or worse…

  But the dread abated in Café Rossi where Tarrou’s ironic bark reigned supreme.

  When Tarrou was not at the cafe, he could often be found lounging in his usual rented chair by the water, not far from where a clockwork hippopotamus spit its elegant jet.

  “Today is no good for travel, Headmaster. The winds are coming in from the north. If I tried to fly home, I’d end up at the South Pole,” Tarrou said from behind his dark glasses. The exquisite glare of the afternoon sun seemed magnified rather than reflected by the mirror balls twisting overhead. Senlin had been roaming the Baths for more than two weeks and still hadn’t grown accustomed to the shattered light, or how it sometimes dimmed when clouds passed, unseen, over the sun outside. “Are you all done with your mysterious errands or ablutions or whatever it is you fritter your days on?”

  “Only taking a break.” Senlin waved a hand before his face, shooing the question away. In truth, he doubted Tarrou really cared to know; the giant just enjoyed teasing him.

  Senlin paid an attendant a half shekel to rent the slat-backed chair beside his friend. In his long dark coat, Senlin stood out among the tourists in bathing suits, though there was one other awkwardly dressed gentleman fidgeting not far from them. Tarrou nodded discreetly toward the nervous man.

  “I have been watching this performance all morning. I think you’ve arrived just in time to see the end of this little tragedy,” Tarrou said. The man in question was pudgy, middle aged, and wore the farcical regalia of an admiral: gold-threaded epaulettes, a purple sash and a three-cornered hat. The well-fed and well-groomed man paced at the water’s edge more like a cornered mouse than a military commander.

  “He is flat broke, they always are, and terribly in debt,” Tarrou said from the corner of his mouth. “And still he has carefully preserved his most ostentatious costume. Here is your peacock, Headmaster. But watch...”

  A few moments later, a detail of six customs agents appeared. Clubs and rapiers wagged from their wide polished belts. The last agent dragged a basket heaped with coal. The agents surrounded the merchant, who immediately began dithering about the misapplication of justice, his powerful connections, and his reversing fortunes. He hopped from foot to foot, his arms raised as if he was trying to waltz through the circled agents. Unmoved, the agents grabbed him and began roughly stripping him of his clothes. Horrified, Senlin moved to interject, but Tarrou was quick to grab his arm and anchor him to his chair. Tarrou put his finger to his lips and gave Senlin a severe look of caution.

  Now cowering in his stretched and stained long underwear, the man wept while two agents shaved his head first with rusty shears and then a notched straightedge. While they worked, another agent aired the man’s name, described the exact nature and size of his debts, and announced how long he would have to work as a hod to level his accounts: twelve years. Twelve years! A whole era of a man’s life lost. For what? An overdrawn account. It seemed out of proportion. The disgraced man sobbed through the judgement as nicks in his scalp welled with blood. At the conclusion of his sentence, the Commissioner’s authority was invoked, and a heavy cuff was locked around his neck. A six-inch iron tube dangled from the collar like a pendant. The agent rolled up the man’s sentence and stuffed it into the tube, screwing the cap closed behind it. The freshly initiated hod was forced to pick up the load of coal, then escorted away.

  “Where does he go?” Senlin asked.

  “There is a passage that is only swept by the feet of hods… It’s called the Old Vein, and it coils through the walls of the Tower, an unlit and unaired crag. It is more dangerous, I’m told, than any mine a man ever dug. Pray you never see it.” Tarrou spoke in a low, dour tone. “That plucked peacock will not survive twelve years. He may not even survive the night. It is a lesson, Headmaster Tom,” Tarrou said. “Be mindful of your debts.”

  Senlin put a fingernail between his teeth. “But surely, this isn’t a common occurrence?”

  “As common as the hods themselves.”

  Despite the vivid reminder that neither his time nor funds were infinite, Senlin began to detect an ebb in the urgency of his search. Something about the beauty and ease of the environment anesthetized his dread and made the episode with the hod seem outrageous.

  A few days later, he completed his tenth circuit of the Baths’ hotels. Most of the concierges had long ago seen through his ruse, or had given up pretending to be fooled. When they saw him coming, they gave a quick shake of their head, and off he went to the next stop on his regular route. Sometimes he would dally under the window of a concert hall, listening to the merry refrains of a brass band. Sometimes he watched the children romp about the shoreline and thought of the coming school year. The school and his duties seemed somehow unreal and unimportant.

  He lost the will to read. He’d still hold the guide between his tightly pinched boney fingers and would set his eyes firmly upon the page. But then his mind would just slide off into fantasy. He’d envision the moment of their reunion. He dreamt up many versions of the scene while he loitered on the curbs outside Customs, waiting for her to walk by with her arms swinging, or with a book to her face, or singing a pub song. In some versions of these fantasies the two of them crashed together like cymbals, and right there, in front of everyone, he held her neck and kissed her.

  Meanwhile, Tarrou played the merry friend. Tarrou’s indulgence was contagious, though in all fairness to him, Tarrou wouldn’t call it indulgence. He would call it reason. “You’re in the Baths, and yet you have never been to the Fountain? That’s like climbing a mountain and refusing to look at the view, Headmaster. Be reasonable!”

  When Senlin finally acquiesced, paid the shekel and went to the Fountain, he discovered that after a few moments spent soaking in a tub, there was not a thought in his head. His feelings of dread just steamed away.

  The Fountain, that garden spire that rose from the heart of the reservoir, was a true marvel of plumbing. The tiled interior was filled with aromatic steam, thick as ocean fog. Pipes and troughs moved water between hundreds of white marble tubs, installed one over the other like the scales of a pinecone. The higher a tub was inside the spire, the more challenging it was for a bather to reach it. One had to climb by ladder and ledge and narrow step. Spillage from one tub cascaded onto the lower tiers like a champagne fountain. The rain of condensation and displaced water was constant yet pleasant. Where the water was drawn from or how it was heated was a mystery that Senlin puzzled over once or twice. No one else seemed to give the question much thought. Soon, neither did he.

  Knowing that the Fountain was the one spot everyone visited (it was, after all, the only place to take a hot bath), Senlin glanced about for Marya, though discreetly and sleepily. Later, when they were out of the Fountain spire and the fog had cleared from his mind, he wondered if his search was any better than the lip service Tarrou paid his wife. Was Marya really likely to be frittering time in a tub while lost in a strange land? Was she even in the Baths? For all he knew, she might still be stuck in the Mayfair nightmare, dutifully playing another man’s wife. Perhaps she was lying in the beer-slurry of a Basement gutter, or maybe she was camping at the site of their parting in the ever-changing Market. He wished he could be certain. He should be more certain. He should know his own wife better.

  Senlin’s lodgings did not include a window or a sink or a writing desk, but even so the room was a drain on his resources. His meals with Tarrou weren’t without expense either, and then there were his occasional soaks to pay for…

  After a month, he calculated he could only afford to stay ten days more, two weeks if he gave up drinking wine in the evening with Tarrou, which suddenly seemed a great inconvenience. This budding sense of entitlement horrified him. But such was the Tower’s effect. First, it turned luxury into necessity, and then the Tower conspired to revoke al
l claims to happiness, dignity, and liberty.

  This perverse metamorphosis, from tourist, to royalty, to hod, plagued Senlin’s imagination. His dread returned with greater force. He could not sleep for days, and then finally when he collapsed into an exhaustion, he dreamt horrible dreams. Before his sleeping gaze, the peacock man was again stripped of his admiral’s costume. Hunched under a great basket of coal, the wretch joined a river of wretches climbing the jagged Old Vein. In this dream, Senlin scoured the hobbling and gaunt procession of hods for Marya, willing, at once, for her face to emerge, and at the same time, fearing that it would.

  As his sheets began to thicken with sweat, he followed the line of bald backs and knuckled spines up the infinite Tower for weeks, for years. When the plucked peacock finally collapsed, his exhausted heart bulging like a tumor from his ribcage, Senlin, forgetting that he was not one of them, forgetting his search for his wife and his old yearning for home, bent down and took up the load.

  Chapter Three

  “Even beauty diminishes with study. It is better to glance than gawk.”

  - Everyman’s Guide to the Tower of Babel, IV. V

  The bell above the door jingled. The post office was as small as a closet but as high as a silo. The postal clerk, who sat behind a caged window in a seamless marble wall, looked like a swept up pile of dust. His collar, though buttoned to the last, rattled emptily about his skeletal neck. He sat scribbling, the scratch-scritch-scratch of his pen nib constant and grating. Other than a wooden writing podium, the post office was bare.

  Senlin asked the clerk for a sheet of stationery and a nib to write with. The request interrupted the clerk’s scribbling, and Senlin could see through the bars that the clerk was systematically blacking out the words in a chapbook, starting from the back and working to the front. As soon as the clerk had taken Senlin’s coin and given him his sheet of stationery, he returned to his methodical, obnoxious scratching.